Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and our food stamp program, among others, are all socialist-leaning programs that help provide our nation with a social safety net. Their growth, however, must be controlled, and self-sufficiency must be the goal of our society. The masses should not depend solely upon these social programs; instead, they should be encouraged early in life to make provisions for themselves and their families well into the future.
If we steadfastly resist the excessive growth of government and its ever-increasing appetite for tax money, reminding our government that there is a document known as the Constitution of the United States that defines and limits its role in our lives, then we will have an opportunity to learn from past mistakes and build on successes to create the kind of nation that will continue to work for all of us.
— CHAPTER 7 —
WHAT IS A
MORAL NATION?
I’VE ALWAYS BEEN A COMPASSIONATE PERSON — sometimes to a fault. After finishing high school and while pursuing my goal of becoming a physician, i befriended a young man whose personal troubles were interfering with his studies, putting him in grave danger of flunking out if he failed to pass the final comprehensive exam. Since his mind was so confused with all that was going on in his life at the time, he had been incapable of retaining material and had no chance of passing. Knowing me to be a very honest person with a deep relationship with god and a strong moral code of ethics, he was terrified to ask me what he felt was his only remaining choice: he wanted me to allow him to copy my answers.
This presented me with a great moral dilemma, because he was a good person who was normally quite capable of passing the exam; I knew that once he got through his personal problems, he would be fine. I tried hard to justify my involvement in cheating, and in the end I did indeed allow him to look at my answers, even though I knew it was wrong. He passed the exam with my help and went on to become a very successful professional who has made a positive difference in the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of people.
In this case, did the end justify the means? He had already gone to the administration requesting a leave of absence and was told that his only option was to pass the exam. Nevertheless, if he had exerted enough effort, I feel confident that another solution could have been found. I regret cheating, but I am profoundly happy for his success today.
Not long after that, when I was a psychology major delving into the mysteries of the human mind, I stepped unknowingly into yet another moral dilemma. During my research for one of the papers in an advanced psychology course, I found some passages that seemed particularly appropriate, and I included them in my writing. I did not, however, indicate that this was the work of someone else; frankly, I had never even heard of the term plagiarism.
When the professor asked me to make an appointment to discuss my paper, I was befuddled. When I stepped into his office, however, I could immediately sense the weight of the moment. He pointed out that I had plagiarized and told me that the consequences for doing so normally included expulsion. I could see all of my dreams of becoming a doctor dashed by my stupidity. Even though I did not know the implications of plagiarism, I certainly should have known inherently that what I was doing was wrong. I had done it before without consequences and probably would have continued doing it if I had not been caught. Fortunately for me, the professor was very compassionate, realized that I was naïve, and gave me a chance to rewrite the paper.
This raises another question: Is ignorance an acceptable excuse for unethical behavior? Certainly those who sanctioned slavery in America thought that black people were inferior and that they were actually doing them a favor by liberating them from the jungles of Africa to associate with “superior beings.” How easy it is to suppress morality for the sake of expediency. They tried every form of rationalization to justify something that they knew was immoral and totally opposed to the self-evident truths that were part of the founding of this nation, namely that “all men are created equal.”
But even that phrase raises questions about equality and how we treat our fellow man. When I was a medical student in Michigan, many of our clinical rotations took place at the county hospital, and a large number of the patients served at this facility were indigent and had no means of paying the hospital bills. Those patients were assigned to the service controlled by the chief resident — not yet an attending physician — while the patients with insurance were assigned to one of the attending physicians with more experience. The chief resident could consult with any attending physician about cases on his service, but he would be the primary caregiver. This meant that there was a double standard of care quality based on a patient’s ability to pay. This practice was common throughout the nation at that time, but has now been largely abandoned. One could legitimately argue that charity cases should be grateful for whatever they can get and that there is nothing immoral about differentiating the care that people receive based on status.
As a society, we make life-and-death decisions all the time based on status. When a disaster occurs, we evacuate children and women first. If a boat is sinking, the lifejackets go to the most vulnerable passengers. This greatly complicates the task of deciding what is or is not moral. In the case of the patients at the county hospital, they all received excellent care, and the majority of them did not even realize that their primary caregiver was a resident rather than an attending physician. Also, it is imperative that resident physicians assume significant responsibility in patient care before they become attending physicians. Every great attending physician was once a resident in need of experience that could only be gained by managing a patient’s agenda directly. Having said that, I have no doubt that many would argue vociferously that it is immoral to have such distinctions in patient care. They would say the patients should be randomly assigned to caretakers — including residents — which would give resident physicians the necessary experience to one day assume the role of attending physician.
A few years ago, I was consulted by a woman who was thirty-three-weeks pregnant with a baby who had been diagnosed by ultrasound to have hydrocephalus or water on the brain. She was on her way to Kansas at the recommendation of her local obstetrician to have an abortion, as Kansas was the only state that would allow a baby to be aborted that was perfectly viable outside the womb without life support. I discussed with her in great detail the implications of having a baby with hydrocephalus, and I discussed with her the many options that were available. In the end, she decided to complete the pregnancy, and we were able to place a shunt in the baby after it was born to divert excess fluid away from the brain. Although the baby had some developmental delays, she continues to thrive today.
Some years ago, I was discussing this case with the head of the ACLU, who had made a statement that the purpose of their organization was to speak for and defend those who could not speak for and defend themselves. I asked whether or not this thirty-three-week-old fetus qualified as a human being incapable of speaking for or defending itself. He artfully dodged answering the question, so I decided to make it easier for him. I told him that there were many premature infants in our neonatal intensive care unit who were several weeks younger than the baby in question. These babies were on life support, but in most cases we had every expectation that they would survive. I asked him if he would speak for and defend the rights of a twenty-eight-week-old baby who was in an incubator and on life support. He replied that that was a no-brainer; of course the ACLU would defend such an individual. As you might imagine, I then asked why it was difficult to defend a baby that was five weeks further along in development and was in the most protected environment possible, but easy to defend a less viable individual who was outside of the womb. He realized his answers were not logical, he said, but he felt that ultimately a woman had the right to terminate a pregnancy until the second that the child is born. This situation perhaps crystallizes one of the major moral dilemmas we face in American society today: Does a woman have the right to terminate another h
uman life because it is encased in her body? Does ownership convey absolute power of life and death over the owned subject? If it does, then NFL quarterback Michael Vick was unfairly imprisoned for torturing and killing dogs in Atlanta.
STILL PAYING FOR OUR SORDID MORAL PAST
During some of our darker periods of American history, when slavery was legal, slave owners felt they had the right to do anything they wanted to their slaves since they were their property. They believed with a passion that the abolitionists were interfering in matters that did not concern them, and they saw no reason why they could not sexually abuse their slaves, beat them, torture them — even kill them at will. But in spite of the concept of one human owning another being so fundamentally despicable and immoral, we were one of the last nations to abolish slavery.
It is not difficult to see why it took the United States so long to join other civilized nations of ridding ourselves of this atrocity. Slave labor was essential to the financial well-being of our fledgling nation, and without it, our struggle for recognition and economic power would probably have had a different outcome.
Since the Bible admonishes slaves to be obedient to their masters, slave owners felt that there was a biblical “stamp of approval” for their activities, which allowed them to live with their guilt. The fact that people willfully broke up families simply for economic gain shows how easily we humans can ignore and justify indescribable inhumanity to our fellow man when we stand to benefit personally. Of course, some slave owners treated their slaves with some degree of respect and even love. Such individuals were in turn respected and loved by their slaves. Such a relationship in no way justifies the institution of slavery, but simply points out a multiplicity of complex relationships.
Not all Americans were in favor of slavery; in fact, the opposition by some was so strong that it threatened to destroy the fragile union that existed between the original thirteen colonies. This sentiment was strongly voiced in the delegates’ discourse in 1787, during the convention in Philadelphia called to revise the Articles of Confederation. Abolitionists led by the Quakers were relentless in their calls for doing away with slavery. After intense and rancorous debates, representatives from the smaller states and larger states finally agreed on a compromise: they would allow the slave states to join the union, but slaves would only be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of establishing the appropriate number of representatives for each state. This was also supposed to be a temporary situation, and there was a general understanding in the union that slavery would soon be abolished because it was both immoral and inconsistent with the concept of a nation for, of, and by the people. Nevertheless, slavery continued for another three-quarters of a century, accompanied by untold atrocities, including vicious rapes and murders. Immorality was widespread, no matter how you looked at it.
I don’t think many question whether slavery was immoral or not; obviously it was, but does that mean that we continue to tip the scales the other way forever because of mistakes that were made more than a century ago? Certain individuals feel that the United States cannot be forgiven for slavery until reparations are made to the descendants of slaves. This belief goes back to Mosaic laws requiring anyone who caused harm to someone else to make reparations to that individual or to the family if the injured individual was dead. There certainly is precedence for reparations in America. Many Native American tribes whose ancestors were deprived of land and resources were given sweetheart deals by our government, which now allows them to own some of the largest and most lucrative gambling casinos in the world.
Many years ago, I was asked to speak at an all-tribe graduation for a large group of Native Americans who owned a massive gambling casino complex. Elders of the tribe told me that they were hoping that I could inspire many of the unmotivated young people to attend college, which the tribe would happily pay for. Since the tribe had so much money, many of the teenagers were happy to drive around in their BMWs and party instead of taking advantage of educational opportunities that would ensure a positive future for the tribe. The reparations the tribe had received were certainly justified given the tremendous losses suffered by Native Americans at the hands of American settlers, but I’m not entirely certain that the end result benefited the tribe as it could have.
I can also understand the idea of reparations for the Japanese-American families who were unjustly interned during World War II. In that case, corrective action was taken at a time when many of the victims could actually benefit from it. In the case of slavery, however, there are neither slaves nor slave owners currently living, so it seems unfair to require people who had nothing to do with slavery to pay for it. I understand the argument that the descendants of slave owners inherited property and large sums of money accumulated through slave labor, and are thus obligated to share the proceeds with the descendants of slaves. There is some legitimacy to such an argument, but no one can really quantify the percentage of assets derived from slave labor in order to distribute them.
Furthermore, where do you draw the line for reparations in the past? If you kept going back you would soon be pre-dating the existence of the United States, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Obviously it is unfair to arbitrarily pick a date or event and say that reparations should commence from that point forward. As Proverbs 17:9 reminds us, peace is more likely when one forgets about past wrongs as opposed to reminding others of them. And if we all concentrate on building on the opportunities that exist and creating a more motivating environment to encourage individuals to achieve, the sky is the limit.
If slavery had ended and everyone had been treated as equals from that point on, it might be easier to excuse the immorality that permitted hundreds of years of slavery in America. Unfortunately, slavery was followed by a system of sharecropping that exploited labor by former slaves, so that effectively they were still slaves. Jim Crow laws also kept African-Americans in a position of servitude both economically and socially. Fatal beatings and lynchings were commonplace throughout the South even into the 1970s. So on the issue of morality with respect to treating one’s fellow man fairly, I think we deserve a failing grade. That does not mean that things have not improved substantially over the last four decades, but four decades does not erase four centuries of brutal oppression.
Even today we exploit our fellow human beings for work. Is it moral for us, for example, to take advantage of cheap labor from illegal immigrants while denying them citizenship? I’m sure you can tell from the way I phrased the question that I believe we have taken the moral low road on this issue. Some segments of our economy would virtually collapse without these undocumented workers — we all know that — yet we continue to harass and deport many individuals who are simply seeking a better life for themselves and their families. Is there a way to apply logic to this issue and arrive at an intelligent solution?
All we have to do is look to our northern neighbor, Canada. They have a guest worker program,1 which allows people to enter the country as officially recognized guest workers who pay taxes, receive benefits, and are able to come and go as they please without infringing on anyone else’s rights. They have the reassuring knowledge that they have contributed to the local economy while at the same time helping their families at home. Why is immigration such a difficult issue for us to deal with? I believe we are so tempted to play politics with this issue that both logic and morality have been thrown out of the window.
WHAT IS A JUST WAR?
What does the fact that we are so often involved in conflicts with other nations say about our morality? Since the inception of our nation, there have been very few extensive periods of peace. To approach the question another way, does an individual of high moral standing frequently find himself fighting with others? By bringing it down to an individual level, it is easier to see that the number of conflicts does not predict the level of morality. Instead, we need to first look at the reasons for the various wars before commenting on their morality.
Most of our nume
rous conflicts could be justified based on our national interests, and even though there were always protesters to our wars, few conflicts were considered immoral until the Vietnam War came along. Many said that stopping communism’s spread was a noble goal and fully justified our involvement in this war, but others argued with some validity that we had no right to assume that our way of governing was superior to communism. As a student at Yale, I can remember these boisterous protests against the war, which echoed on college campuses across the nation.
During that war in the jungles of Vietnam, we burned villages with napalm and destroyed the lives of many innocent villagers who had nothing to do with the political struggle. The Vietcong forces had the tremendous advantage of knowing both the terrain and the people, which eventually afforded them victory in the war. Even though we had overwhelming force, we had no way to deploy it in jungle terrain. Many of our soldiers were not clear about their overall mission, which surely had a negative effect on their enthusiasm. If communist forces had been trying to invade the United States, there would have been no question about the goals of the military and the country at large, and no sacrifice would have been too great in order to achieve victory. There also would have been no question about the morality of defending our way of life in our own country. Since the Vietnam conflict ended poorly, our nation experienced a period of shame and humiliation for which the military was blamed, and many of the returning veterans were treated with disrespect. The Vietnam War2 dampened America’s enthusiasm for war, and we experienced one of the longest periods of peace in our nation’s history.
America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great Page 12